Citywide séance: Seoul Mediacity Biennale 2025 calls forth spirits and stories

This year’s Seoul Mediacity Biennale unfolds as a vast séance — a ritual where the living seek to commune with spirits unseen.

If its title, “Séance: Technology of Spirit,” isn’t a dead giveaway, the clues lie elsewhere. Nearly a third of the artists on view are themselves deceased. And many, in their lifetimes, sought to speak with the other side through their practice: Hilma af Klint, Georgiana Houghton, Onisaburo Deguchi, Emma Kunz and even Nam June Paik.

Yet ultimately, the séance here is more than an invocation of the dead. It stands as a metaphor for summoning back all the “dead” stories and presences long purged by Western modern rationalism — the supernatural, the mystical, the ancestral, the subconscious and the transcendent.

Installation view of this year's Seoul Mediacity Biennale at the Seoul Museum of Art / Courtesy of SeMA

Zai Nomura's "Fantome" (2024/2025) / Courtesy of SeMA

“The advent of modernity imposed this widening chasm between science and spiritual practice. This was especially true in East Asia, as well as in other parts of the world,” said Hallie Ayres, one of a trio of curators alongside Anton Vidokle and Lukas Brasiskis, at the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA), the biennale’s primary venue.

“This modernity was imposed by colonial powers, but in certain ways, spiritual practices never stopped existing; They were suppressed or pushed underground,” Brasiskis added.

To revisit the philosophies and technologies that endured outside the Western colonial framework is to glimpse their disruptive, emancipatory potential — a force that has inspired artists to pursue visions that are feminist, ecological and anti-capitalist.

Johanna Hedva's "The Clock Is Always Wrong (Die Furie der Holle)" (2022) / Courtesy of SeMA

The biennale opens with a punchy image overhead: Johanna Hedva’s monumental textile prints of a demonic avenger, entwined with snakes and bearing a severed head in her hand. The illustration is drawn from an 18th-century grimoire, “Compendium of Demonology and Magic,” whose title page offers a sinister warning to the uninitiated: “Noli me tangere" (Do not touch me).

From there, visitors pass through a long, dark fabric tunnel and emerge into a gallery of early abstractions that resist the standard narrative. Modern art’s turn to abstraction has often been framed as a declaration of creative independence from external influences — art purely made for its own sake.

But here, it reveals itself otherwise: Georgiana Houghton’s “spirit drawings” were guided by angels and saints; Hilma af Klint’s paintings were born as commissions from the “High Masters;” and Emma Kunz’s geometric diagrams were designed as tools of diagnosis and healing.

Meanwhile, across the globe, Onisaburo Deguchi, a mystic who cofounded the new Shinto religion Oomoto in Japan, conjured thousands of tea bowls by hand, charging the clay with spiritual energy and an aesthetic sensibility distinct from the austere traditions of Raku ceramics.

And decades later, Nam June Paik blurred the boundary between spiritual meditation and new media in “TV Buddha,” where a statue of Buddha contemplates its own image on a television fed by a live camera.

Nam June Paik's "TV Buddha" (1989) / Courtesy of SeMA

Taken together, these works sketch an alternative history of art, where it is a passageway and a conduit to other worlds.

This opening section feels like where the biennale’s strength seems to lie the most, both conceptually and visually. But the exhibition has plenty more to offer as it delves deeper into themes of transcendence and healing.

Some dwell on states of trance, reminding us that the boundaries of consciousness and reason are far more porous than we are taught to believe, as in Joachim Koester’s video “Tarantism.”

Others turn to humanity’s violent impulses — our exploitation of other species and our mindless destruction of the very environment that keeps us alive. Yin-Ju Chen’s “Extrastellar Evaluations,” for instance, views such threads of darker human history through the lens of an alien intelligence and characterizes them as a gross “misalignment” with the cosmic order.

Installation view of "Séance: Technology of Spirit" / Courtesy of SeMA

Installation view of "Séance: Technology of Spirit" / Courtesy of SeMA

Ascending the stairs, visitors encounter how these tendencies might be redressed through ancestral rituals or alternative modes of healing. Bodies are healed, spirits are recalibrated and the line between enlightenment and applied science is reconciled.

The final chapter of the show reaches into a decolonial reckoning, indicating the destruction of Indigenous traditions under Western imperialism. It reminds us that the dead — and the histories they carried — do not vanish with their bodies, but persist, haunting and shaping the worlds we inhabit today.

Kwon Byung-jun's "Opening Blooming from the center; Golden Flower of Potential" (2025) / Courtesy of SeMA

In Korea, memories of political scandals involving presidents entangled with religious charlatans or dubious shamanistic rites have left some wary of the mystical when it appears in public-funded exhibitions like the Seoul Mediacity Biennale.

But the curators insist such history does not need to close doors for meaningful exploration.

“Any kind of technology can be used to heal or to damage. Spiritual practices are not an exception,” said curator Vidokle. “As much as they can carry emancipatory potential, for healing potential, we also know religion has been misused in a very damaging way. Our approach is not an endorsement of any particular practice, but an inquiry to their plurality.”

Ayres added, “The exhibition also proposes to weaken the tether between spiritual practices and new obscurantism, where these practices are used toward the goals of resurgent nationalism or bolstering state projects for violent ends.”

Beyond the Seoul Museum of Art, the biennial spills into the city, filling Nakwon Sangga, Cinematheque Seoul Art Cinema and Seoul Artists’ Platform_New&Young with satellite shows, film programs and performances.

The Seoul Mediacity Biennale runs through Nov. 23.